SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Monday 19 January 2026
Welcome to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Fourth Edition. Some sample entries appear below. Click here for the Introduction; here for what we mean by Science Fiction; here for the masthead; here for some Statistics; here for the Acknowledgments; here for the FAQ; here for advice on citations. Find entries via the search box above (more details here) or browse the menu categories in the grey bar at the top of this page.
Site updated on 14 January 2026
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von Däniken, Erich
(1935-2026) Swiss author of a series of purportedly nonfiction books, beginning with Erinnerungen an die Zukunft (1968; trans Michael Heron as Chariots of the Gods? 1969), which, based on a mass of often suspect and internally inconsistent data, argues that the Earth was visited by at least one Alien spacefaring race before and at the dawn of historical time; thus, for example, the Great Pyramid of ...
Adams, Scott
(1957-2026) US author and cartoonist best known for the Dilbert strip published from 1989, which when at its best superbly (in terms of concept and accuracy of Satire rather than quality of drawing) satirized contemporary office life and corporate incompetence. As with most ambitious modern comic strips, it segues frequently into sf and fantasy tropes – such as Robot office workers, wish-fulfilling ...
Sakai, Stan
(1953- ) US Comic-strip artist and writer, born in Kyoto, Japan, raised in Hawaii, and now based in Pasadena, California, known for keeping the anthropomorphic funny-animal tradition alive in the twenty-first Century by telling tales of a wandering, masterless samurai rabbit in seventeenth-century Japan. That series, Usagi Yojimbo, has the distinction of being the longest-running comic-book series by a single writer/artist, with no ...
Lane, Jeremy
(1893-1963) US author of two Lost Race tales: Yellow Men Sleep (3 May-31 May 1919 All-Story Weekly as "The Fragrant Web"; 1919) features the sophisticated empire of Tau Kuan, whose rulers are descended from the Great Khans, and who have remained hidden in the Gobi Desert sustained by the Drug Koresh as the once-fertile region desiccated, but whose secretive trade in the drug now ...
Otherside Picnic
Japanese animated tv series (2021). Based on the Light Novels by Iori Miyazawa (illustrated by shirakaba). Liden Films, Felix Film. Directed by Takuya Satō. Written by Takuya Satō. Voice cast includes Yumiri Hanamori, Rina Hidaka, Ai Kayano and Miyu Tomita. Twelve 24-minute episodes. Colour. / As the title suggests, this work is influenced by Arkady and Boris Strugatski's ...
Nicholls, Peter
(1939-2018) Australian editor and author, primarily a critic and historian of sf through his creation and editing of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction [see below]; resident in the UK 1970-1988, in Australia from 1988; worked as an academic in English literature (1962-1968, 1971-1977), scripted television documentaries, was a Harkness Fellow in Film-making (1968-1970) in the USA, worked as a publisher's editor (1982-1983), often broadcast film and book reviews on BBC Radio from 1974 and ...